essays

and other short stuff

In November and December of 2012, I spent a few weeks going through these and doing whatever I had to do to still feel okay about having my name on them. As an unknown writer in 2002, I had a high incentive to attract attention and a low incentive to avoid mistakes. As I got more readers, those priorities gradually switched places, and also some of my ideas have changed.

In revising my essays, I did three different kinds of things: annotation, rewriting, and disclaimers. For example, How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth was annotated to keep all the stuff I was wrong about and explain why I was wrong. The Effects of Highly Habitual People was so heavily rewritten that I saved the original version. Arno-geddon was kept unchanged, but with a disclaimer at the top. The Slow Crash has some of all three. Your Life As Pornography is the only thing that was already perfect. The singularity essays were so difficult that they stalled the project, so I also never got around to fixing "How to Save Civilization".
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